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peanut butter and jelly — it’s what’s for lunch

We have peanut butter and jelly almost every day for lunch. I kid you not, although oddly we did not have it today. Instead we had toast with strawberry butter (more on that next week) and apples with (you guessed it) peanut butter. It would be a very sad day indeed if we were to run out of peanut butter. I know this for a fact as it almost happened several months ago.

For years, we’ve been getting our peanut butter from Costco. They had an all natural nothing but peanuts and peanut oil peanut butter that we really liked. Life was good, and then it happened. We got a call from Costco letting us know that there was a recall on their peanut butter, and we needed to bring it back for a refund. No problem, I thought, I had a couple of jars on the shelf that were not affected by the recall that would surely tide us over.

Week after week, I went to buy my peanut butter and they didn’t have any. I was starting to panic, we were only a few days away from being completely out. I headed out to the grocery store to buy some and was floored by the five dollar price tag of a little bottle of natural peanut butter. Holy cow. There were cheaper ones to be sure, but shoot, I had no idea what half of the ingredients were. So once again, I took things into my own hands. I headed back to Costco and bought a tub of peanuts.

Armed with my tub of peanuts, I grabbed my coconut oil (because you know, you can use coconut oil for just about anything), pulled out the Vitamix and threw some peanuts and oil in. After blowing the breaker on my Vitamix several times, I found success — peanut butter.

Now I make peanut butter every couple of weeks. I have to admit, I miss the days of just grabbing it from the pantry, but not enough to shell out that kind of cash for the good stuff and not enough to start eating Skippy. If you’re interested, here’s what I do.

Throw about two cups of peanuts into the blender. Add a couple of tablespoons of coconut oil. Blend it up. If you have a Vitamix, you’ll probably want to use the tamper.

Once it starts looking like peanut butter, add another couple of cups of peanuts and another tablespoon of oil. Mix it up and you’re done. Store it in the fridge. I don’t really know how long it will last as it doesn’t stay very long in our fridge.